Rethinking Social Justice: From Peoples to Populations

Description

In the early 1970s, Australian governments began to treat Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as “peoples” with capacities for self-government. Forty years later, confidence in Indigenous self-determination has been eroded by accounts of Indigenous pathology, misplaced policy optimism, and persistent socio-economic gaps. This record accounts for this shift by arguing that Australian thinking about the Indigenous is a continuing, unresolvable tussle between the ideas of “peoples” and “population.” Offering snapshots of moments in the last 40 years in these tensions are palpable—from honoring the heritage and quantifying the disadvantage to acknowledging colonization’s destruction and projecting Indigenous recovery from it—this book not only asks if a settler colonial state can instruct the colonized in the arts of self-government, but also how could it justify doing anything less.